Don't be the smartest person in the room

"If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong fuckin' room". This is one of my favourite quotes of all time. I don't know who said it, but it struck a cord with me. Why? Because it talks to one of the most fundamental truths of life, which most of us try to ignore. The fact of life is, if you want to be successful, you have to work for it. Most of us are just happy with being comfortable. Sure, life can be better, sure there's a dream out there, but it's just a dream. We don't want to make the extra effort to go that next step because it means we have to get out of our comfort zone. So in the end, we're satisfied with just being the smartest in the room rather than always striving to go to that next step. And how do you figure out what that next step is? You look at what other successful people do, learn from them, and apply what you've learnt.

But before you start thinking that this blog post is going to be filled with "positive thinking baloney", just hear me out for a second. I'm not talking about creating the next big idea that the world demands, or become the next visionary entrepreneur that every author wants to write about, and every Management School from Harvard to the University of Queensland wants to give you an honorary doctorate. Yes, these guys are more than likely living by the same quote and it is perhaps a contributing factor to their success. But I've never met these people in real life, let alone gotten to know them at a personal level to truly identify their keys to success. By the way, don't trust books or people who tell you that they know what makes these successful people tick. If it was that easy, we'd all be doing it.

So, with any illusions of me trying give you a grandiose positive thinking babble out of the way, let's get back to reality. Let's apply that quote to your work and to your day (social or otherwise). As we go through the post, try to be honest with yourself. If you do this, you'll hopefully be able to see why this is my favourite quote. 

Let's start with the office. Take a look at your diary and the meetings you've had for the last week. If you don't have one of those jobs that has lots of meetings, then go back two weeks, or take a look at the colleagues you have spent the most amount of time with. With the exception of your direct leader, what is the proportion of time you've actually spent with influential colleagues? I don't mean senior people like CEOs, but colleagues or peers that are widely recognized as high performers. Of these high performers, what is the proportion of high performers you've spent time with who are actually from another team, another department, or better yet, another division altogether? Be honest with yourself and take a detailed look. Include formal meetings, gossip sessions (I'm sure they're known as something else, but I'm not politically savvy enough to know what the correct term is), elevator chats, lunches, drinks, or dinners (not the romantic kind - this isn't that kind of blog). 

I think with the exception of a few of us, only a small proportion of our time is spent with high performers. No, spending time with yourself doesn't count - even if you are a high performer. That proportion becomes even smaller if you factor in whether the high performers are from another team or not. In fact, the proportion is probably so small that it is negligible. If you're wondering what percentage is good, bad, or indifferent, then you're missing the point. It's not a numbers game. It's whether you actually spend any time with high performers at all and what you do with that time.

You see, as I looked back at my own diary over the last fortnight, I realised the activities that I was most satisfied with (other than my own team meetings), were the meetings where I got to direct the outcome, where I stood out as the person who knew what the right thing to do was, and where I was given compliments by the people in the room. Then it struck me, it was almost always with the same people. And while these were lovely people and colleagues I'd love to spend time with, 99% of the time, they were learning from me and seeking my guidance. I loved the feeling of being needed, I loved the compliments of how great my guidance was. But, the feeling of being wanted doesn't help you climb the corporate ladder. All it does is give you a sense of comfort and confidence in where you are and what you do. It creates the illusion that where you are is good enough. This illusion is dangerous, because it saps you of ambition and motivation. You are comfortable after all. The irony of life is, just as you get comfortable, the world changes, and change is imposed upon you. You're shocked out of your deep slumber, wondering what happened, and then spending months trying to figure out what to do and how to navigate the office. In a changed office environment, you start to see people get promoted that you hadn't expected. That's because while you were loving the compliments you were getting, they were on alert, trying to see what's coming down the line, then positioning themselves to be in the best place when the opportunity comes. Positioning themselves, often means being exposed to not just the right people in the current environment, but to people who may be influential in a changed environment. They're always looking out, always seeing who they need to be exposed to, and who they need to learn from.

I realized I had fallen into this trap as I looked at my diary, and then compared myself to my peers. In meetings that they were invited to, where the "doing" had to be done, they were often missing. I was often the only person at my level in those meetings - the most senior person in the room. I was feeling good at being "the man", the one with all the attention, delivering the goods and more often than not, with my peers' team members. But where were my peers? I'm not going to say how, but I'm lucky enough to have contacts that can tell me where they are. As I studied where they were, I realized that while I was busting my gut trying to get the doing done, they were in meetings with more important people and more important peers. Those who even in my non-politically savvy eyes, can be recognized as "influencers" or high performers. They were prioritizing exposure to smarter people over the doing. It doesn't matter whether you think it's morally or ethically right or wrong, the reality is while I'm busy doing the right thing, they're busy getting the right exposure. So when the opportunity comes for a promotion, the decision-maker is likely to look at my name and wonder "who the hell is that".

But morals and ethics aside, the other sad truth is that I'm not learning from those smarter than me or have knowledge other than mine. If I don't know how they operate (mentally or operationally), how do I grow and expand my own perspectives? I'd be stuck with just my own experiences, which can only take me so far. There is a very famous Chinese saying, "the frog at the bottom of the well looks up and says that the sky is just a small circle". Trust me, it sounds better in Chinese. But if we don't spend time with high performers, observe what makes them a high performer, learn from them, and then apply what we've observed, then we're limiting ourselves to just our own experiences, skills, and biases. If you don't contrast yourself with high performers, then you won't know your own weaknesses and have no hope of addressing them. That kind of siloed mentality will stop you from progressing up the ladder, or at least, make it very difficult. And we have all been exposed to the "frogs in the well" at work. A good baseline is people who are often labelled by their peers and bosses as "lacking in self awareness". They think they know everything already and no matter what feedback is given to them, nothing changes in their behaviours. Then years later, they wonder why they haven't progressed and become bitter and lash out at the high performers. 

But it's not too late to change. I'm going to take this action starting Monday. I'm going to still do the right thing but keep my eyes open to opportunities to spend more time with high performers. Like I've said in my previous posts, the action doesn't have to be a massive change. I'm going to identify the high performers or those who can expand my horizon and be in a meeting with at least one of them per week. Then at the end, I'm going to jot down what I've observed about them, then try to apply those skills myself. Take one small action at a time and when you look back in a few months time, you'll realize just how big a change you've made.

Photo credit by Breather on Unsplash.